Witness Box Research Articles

Artificial Intelligence- In The Witness Box

Artificial Intelligence- In The Witness Box

Understanding the nurse's role as a professional witness.

Nurses working in any setting may be required to assist the courts or coroners by preparing statements or giving evidence in court. Nurses can act as 'professional witnesses' who provide evidence of something they have seen, heard or been involved with as part of their professional duties. This article outlines how nurses should respond to requests for written statements and suggests a format for providing such statements. It also explains the typical approach to providing oral evidence in court and how nurses should prepare and present themselves in the witness box.

A Feminist Ethos of Point Zero

A Feminist Ethos of Point Zero

Introduction

Introduction

Department Chair to Witness Box: When Mercurial Tenure and Promotion Processes Lead to Court

Department Chair to Witness Box: When Mercurial Tenure and Promotion Processes Lead to Court

Review Essay: Surgeons at the Bar: From the Crime Scene to the Courtroom

How did English and Welsh medical practitioners enter the common-law courtroom as expert witnesses, and how can one assess their influence on crime-scene investigations and courtroom testimony? Witnesses offering specialist opinions were hardly novel in the eighteenth-century London courtroom, but their participation grew at such a pace that, by the early 1900s, they had become regular participants in police investigation and criminal trials. Even as their presence grew, their evolution was not a singular event: defense lawyers, judges, and juries were experiencing qualitative changes in their roles in the adjudication of crime just as prison surgeons, asylum superintendents, and hospital medical officers entered the witness box. It is the singular achievement of this important study that Katherine D. Watson has isolated critical moments in the growth of medicine's role while embedding the practitioners’ rise within the shifting dynamics of criminal prosecution in early modern England.

Witness Box Protocol: Automatic machine identification and authentication in industry 4.0

The current wave of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is reshaping the manufacturing sector with system interoperability, remote real-time process monitoring and advanced analytics. As digitally enabled manufacturing machines continue to grow exponentially, it becomes imperative to uniquely and securely identify them in the cyber-physical world, particularly in defense, biomedical, energy and aerospace manufacturing. Research about threats originating from internal adversaries’ i.e the machine/organization owner within a tiered digitally connected supply chain is scarce. This paper introduces a machine fingerprinting scheme named as the ‘Witness Box Protocol’ (WBP) that exploits the physical properties of manufacturing machines (legacy or smart) and their surroundings to create a unique biometric like fingerprint. WBP provides both machine registration and authentication on a digital network through a low cost, non-invasive approach. The fingerprint is generated by a Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) technique that accommodates small variations in physical signature data and can corroborate data provenance from machines by verifying machine identity through authentication. Additionally, this fingerprint hash simplifies asset management within a large enterprise or distributed network comprising of thousands of machines in a Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) paradigm. In this research, fingerprints were randomly generated from the statistical features of signals from 3D printers and CNC machine in a production-like lab environment. Using k-means clustering and Jaccard similarity index, these fingerprints are shown to identify the source equipment with 95 % accuracy.

Judicialising history or historicisng law: reflections on Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt

In 2000, David Irving brought a libel action against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books focusing on allegedly defamatory allegations in her book Denying the Holocaust associating him with the Holocaust revisionist movement. The case concluded in April 2000 with Irving’s defeat. By focusing on Irving’s methodological technique, the defendants succeeded in establishing that Irving’s misrepresentations and falsifications were neither accidental nor careless but ideologically motivated. His character was presented and censured as one which manipulated and distorted in order to facilitate a racist agenda. 
 Presiding judge, Mr Justice Gray was keen not to pollute the exercise of justice by acting as a quasi-historian, nevertheless Irving sharpened the focus on the relationship between historians and courts. Can history migrate from the amphitheatre to the witness box and re-emerge with its integrity intact? Historians are increasingly called as expert witnesses and this has resulted in huge controversies, intra-historian strife and debates on experts’ ethics. Thus, despite this article’s mooring in a Holocaust context, it raises questions relevant to the much wider context of history and law, and as regards “public history”. Law and history will meet continuously during litigation. Judicial and historical understandings of evidence should not be either intuitively or automatically elided and even a Holocaust context should not conquer the quest for a mutually self-aware relationship. Without engaging in endless discussions concerning the nature of knowledge and the philosophy of history, judges require standards for assessing the weight of historical evidence to ensure “intellectual due process” and that, evidentially at least, legal conclusions are sound. How can historians best facilitate the legal process and how can lawyers avoid mistranslating historical work? A legally created standard (such as Mr Justice Gray attempted) for expert evidence appears attractive. Admissibility or reliability tests are options and open up issues such as bar-appointed experts and expert ethical codes. Ultimately, the quest is not to crowbar unwilling historians into roles as mere judicial handmaidens, but instead to recognise wider societal contributions of historians and to give due credit to the 'reasonable historian'. 
 When historians appear as expert witnesses, they are not 'doing history', they are communicating historical expertise in another forum. Such cross-pollinating communication or 'public history' is a process of translation. Undoubtedly, law is the dominant discipline in court and history is being instrumentalised. However, with due care, such interactions need not distort complex historical studies or restrict future historical research. Disciplinary faithfulness can be preserved by legal reliance on historical guild-standards. In this way, standards regarding intellectual rigour and methodological integrity are safeguarded and notions that there is one history for historians and another/lesser one for courts are avoided.

A Multicultural Comprehension of Traditional Dancing in Ghana and China: A Genealogical Analysis

This paper uncovers both Ghanaian and the Chinese various traditional dances in as much as multicultural comprehension is concerned. There is no denying of the fact that, China has a lot of rich and genealogical traditional dances as applicable to Ghana. Both countries have a peculiar historical traditional ways of doing things most especially dancing, in so far as their respective jurisdictions are concerned. Traditional dancing is not left out of the witness box when accounting for the genealogical analysis on both China and Ghana. Gone were the days when traditional dancing brings people together as one and also even provides a platform for people in meeting their life partners. This handful significance is still in existence. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3385128

The Language of Forensic Experts: A Commentary on the Sally Clark Case ]1999-2002

According to the judge, jury and the public in the UK, Sally Clark murdered her two sons. The prosecution forensic expert had submitted his evidence using complex medical and scientific language that misled the jury. The defence expert failed to challenge him. A few years later, Mrs. Clark was proven innocent, as there was undisclosed evidence and the language of the prosecution forensic expert misled the jury. This paper raises some issues according to the Sally Clark case. It includes some discussions about the expert’s role in the adversarial system and also compares it with the inquisitorial system. It is an approach towards understanding whether the expert should stand in the witness box or not. This paper answers whether the decision in the Sally Clark would have taken a different direction, if it was dealt under the inquisitorial justice system or other experts’ systems. Although this case has helped to re-open many other cases, it has not encouraged the English criminal justice system to make any changes with the expert system (especially in complex forensic cases). It also affected experts who now think that testifying in court is a risk. This paper presents a new approach that, if considered, can protect the justice system from any miscarriages, the experts themselves from being blamed and the public who look at both as killers.

Alzheimer's disease

In his genre-defining Encyclopédie (1765), the French philosopher Denis Diderot defined dementia as “a disease consisting in a paralysis of the spirit characterised by abolition of the reasoning faculty“. For Diderot's generation, dementia (from the Latin demens, “without mind“) was a new frame for an old and diverse set of labels—imbecility, fatuitas, dotage—denoting a progressive and irreversible decline in what we'd now call cognitive and social functioning, typically associated with old age. Over the next three centuries, as more nations experienced the demographic transition associated with industrial capitalism, they have encountered a series of challenges associated with all forms of dementia and Alzheimer's disease in particular. Should old age be seen as a disease in itself? Where do we draw the boundaries between medicine and social care? And how do we provide chronic care for a growing population of older people? Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF InfluenzaIn daily life, influenza might seem almost banal: how many of us get through the winter without a bout of flu? For those concerned with global health, however, few diseases provoke more unease. Influenza's history evokes the great themes of modern medicine: the insecure relationship between clinical knowledge and effective treatments; medicine's growing role in global networks of control; and the importance of memory and uncertainty in our responses to disease. Full-Text PDF DepressionMeteorology, economics, and geology—all have their depressions. Mid-19th century laboratory physiologists also spoke of depression—a decline in the biochemical output of an organ—and this usage, with its connotations of functional materialism, haunts the contemporary concept of depression. As the physician and historian Laura D Hirshbein argues, depression is “a twentieth-century phenomenon that incorporates assumptions about gender, profession, and science”, reflecting the shifting balance of power between theories, therapies, and patients' experiences. Full-Text PDF

Radiology in the witness box: manipulation or clarification?

Post-mortem imaging especially CT scanning has become common practice in medico-legal death investigation. Inevitably these images are being used in court proceedings. How the content of those images should be presented to court is uncertain notwithstanding the ability to so-called post-process the data to produce 3-D reconstructions and the like. This requires the input of a specialist to view the images and highlight the salient features; a process the courts initially found difficult with photography but which is now generally accepted since the introduction of digital photography. To a greater extent post-mortem CT images can be altered to show with greater clarity the postulated areas of interest for the benefit of the court. Clearly, safeguards must be in place to prevent unscrupulous or overzealous manipulation although in reality at this time there would seem to be an unfair advantage in the use of such imagery by the often better resourced Crown.

Cholera

From 1817 onwards European governments, struggling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, watched with growing horror as a new and terrible disease left its historical heartland in south Asia and began to move west. Cholera, in the words of an editorial in the Quarterly Review, was “one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever devastated the earth”. Like malaria or HIV/AIDS, cholera has an inescapably global history: seven subsequent pandemics have provoked revolutions in public health, and an entirely new vision of global medicine in an age of interconnection. SchistosomiasisEven the most colourless clinical description of schistosomiasis comes across like a pitch for an early David Lynch body horror. Waterborne flatworm larvae penetrate the skin, and move in the bloodstream through the heart and lungs to the liver. Here they mature and mate in the portal circulation, before laying eggs that lodge in the liver—occasionally the spinal cord or genitals—or leave the body via the bladder or intestinal walls. The framing of schistosomiasis as a parasitic tropical disease emerged from a series of global encounters—between medicine and science, between industrial nations competing for dominance, and between imperial governments and their indigenous subjects. Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF InfluenzaIn daily life, influenza might seem almost banal: how many of us get through the winter without a bout of flu? For those concerned with global health, however, few diseases provoke more unease. Influenza's history evokes the great themes of modern medicine: the insecure relationship between clinical knowledge and effective treatments; medicine's growing role in global networks of control; and the importance of memory and uncertainty in our responses to disease. Full-Text PDF

Gout

As he tried to evoke the agonies of his gout-stricken patients in the first century CE, the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia did not mince his words: “No other pain is more severe than this, not iron screws, nor cords, nor the wound of a dagger, nor burning fire.” Like osteoarthritis, like dental caries, gout is one of many chronic diseases that, in the words of the historians Roy Porter and George Rousseau, “are not in themselves fatal, but incurable, typically debilitating, sometimes crippling and inordinately painful”. Aretaeus and his contemporaries worked in a classical tradition that understood gout as an essentially protean condition. In the familiar acute form, podagra (from the Greek for “foot-trap”), the excess humours generated by a sedentary lifestyle and a rich diet accumulated in the joints of the thumb or big toe. In this sense gout, like diarrhoea or vomiting, might be merely an occasional crisis, the sign of a healthy constitution adjusting its inner balance. But more serious symptoms—debilitating headaches or heart palpitations—could arise if these humours moved to the major organs. OsteoarthritisStiffness and pain in the joints was for centuries seen as a mark of mortality, one of the natural shocks of old age: just look at Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Rowlandson's caricatures of old people, with their crooked digits and knobbly joints. Since the 16th century, anatomists have been familiar with the basic structure of joints—bones capped with cartilage, connected by ligaments, and lubricated by synovial fluid—and the name they gave to the principal disorder of these joints is a classic example of plain English put into learned Greek: arthritis, literally joint inflammation. Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF Liver cirrhosisIn a footnote to his erotically charged botanical poem The Loves of the Plants (1791), Erasmus Darwin, Enlightenment freethinker and Charles Darwin's grandfather, offered his own eccentric take on the myth of Prometheus as a metaphor for the effect of hard drink on the liver: “The swallowing of drams cannot be better represented in hieroglyphic language than by taking fire into one's bosom; and certain it is, that the general effect of drinking spirituous liquors is an inflamed, schirrous, or paralytic liver“. Full-Text PDF

Thinking outside the (Witness) Box: Integrating Experts into Juries to Minimise the Effect of Rape Myths in Sexual Violence Cases

The criminal justice system's response to sexual violence has been increasingly recognised as an area needing attention. In particular, rape myths have a significant impact on whether a victim is believed or not, and this extends to the jury. Due to the potential effect of misconceptions about sexual violence on the jury's decision-making process, alternatives and additional tools have been suggested to minimise this impact. This article looks at options for moving forward such as increasing education and guidance for the jury, as well as changing the fact-finder, but ultimately advocates a new approach of integrating experts with knowledge about sexual violence and its realities into the jury itself. This would allow for responses tailored to each case to create an educative mechanism while maintaining lay participation, and have decisions that are based on accurate understandings of sexual violence.

Syphilis

For early modern physicians syphilis was “the great imitator”, a disease that mystified with the sheer range of its symptoms and the length of time it might take to show itself. Syphilis was first recorded in Europe in the mid-1490s, and the coincidence with Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World led contemporary physicians (along with more recent archaeologists and historians) to conclude that his sailors had brought the disease back with them. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF SchizophreniaDementia praecox, dementia paranoides, catatonia, hebephrenia, stupefaction—just the terms historically associated with schizophrenia could fill up a short essay on the subject. The contentious and surprisingly short history of this diagnosis draws out some of the most difficult questions in psychiatry. Is schizophrenia a natural entity, awaiting objective description, or does it emerge from a shifting intersection of contexts? Is good practice a matter of grouping disorders into broad categories based on underlying resemblances, or does accurate diagnosis depend on breaking these generalisations down into lists of specific symptoms? Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF OsteoarthritisStiffness and pain in the joints was for centuries seen as a mark of mortality, one of the natural shocks of old age: just look at Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Rowlandson's caricatures of old people, with their crooked digits and knobbly joints. Since the 16th century, anatomists have been familiar with the basic structure of joints—bones capped with cartilage, connected by ligaments, and lubricated by synovial fluid—and the name they gave to the principal disorder of these joints is a classic example of plain English put into learned Greek: arthritis, literally joint inflammation. Full-Text PDF

On Jordan's <em>From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film</em>

On Jordan's From Nuremberg to Hollywood:The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film Lawrence Baron From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film. By James Jordan. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2016. 245 pp., ISBN-10: 0853038740 (hc), US $89.95. In From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film, his pioneering survey of American Holocaust courtroom dramas, James Jordan traces how these films evolved from a reliance on "the once shocking, then iconic, but eventually overused black-and-white footage of liberation to the representation of the Holocaust through the use of oral testimony delivered by Jewish survivors from the witness box" (9). He attributes this shift to the evidentiary strategies employed by the prosecution teams in the trials that inspired such films and the growing awareness of the Holocaust in American public memory. At the International Military Tribunal (IMT) held in Nuremberg (1945–1946), the United States introduced five documentaries consisting of newsreel clips about Hitler's rise to power, his regime, and footage of the appalling sights encountered by Allied troops when they liberated concentration, death, and labor camps. These documentaries served as proof that the Nazi leaders in the docket were guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war, and of implementing policies that resulted in such calculated carnage and cruelty to civilian populations and captured enemy soldiers. The devastating impression left by the liberation footage overshadowed the voluminous dossiers of incriminating documents and sparse survivor testimony [End Page 236] entered as evidence of German transgressions. In accordance with the charges leveled against the German defendants at Nuremberg, the persecution and slaughter of European Jewry were subsumed under the categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Consequently, the use of newsreel and liberation footage as authentic evidence of the barbarism and belligerent intent of Hitler and his henchmen often reappeared in feature films about the trials of Nazi officials and their collaborators. Moreover, the first scripted motion pictures dealing with this subject matter followed the Nuremberg precedent of marginalizing the Holocaust and the testimony of Jewish survivors in favor of focusing on the villainy of the Nazi perpetrators. Jordan begins his analysis of individual films with André de Toth's None Shall Escape (USA, 1944). Since President Roosevelt had announced in 1942 that the United Nations would convene postwar trials of the Nazi leaders, de Toth imagined the content and look of such proceedings. None Shall Escape revolves around the testimony of three eyewitnesses regarding whether the "crimes of murder, unlawful detention, degenerate atrocities, and common theft" enumerated by the chief justice were committed by Wilhelm Grimm, an ethnic German who returned to his hometown in Poland as the head of the German occupation during World War II. The town's priest, Grimm's anti-Nazi brother, and Grimm's former girlfriend recall his anger over Germany's defeat in World War I and the inclusion of the town within Poland's interwar borders; his immigration to Germany and enlistment in the Nazi Party; his imprisonment of his brother for subversive activities; and his role in exploiting Polish labor, persecuting Jews, and ultimately ordering their massacre when the local rabbi incites them to resist deportation. Their accounts segue into realistic flashbacks that trace Grimm's metamorphosis from an innocuous teacher of German into a callous tyrant. While Jordan appreciates that None Shall Escape is unique among Hollywood wartime films in its emphasis on the plight of the Jews, he faults the picture for lacking a Jewish witness, even though this obviously reflects the fact that none of the town's Jewish inhabitants survived to tell the story. However, the rabbi's impassioned call to arms—which leftist screenwriter Lester Cole culled from a rousing speech delivered by the communist Dolores Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War—admirably fills this void.1 In chapter 2 Jordan examines how American feature films produced from 1946 until 1961 interjected familiar scenes or referents from the Nuremberg documentaries to indict Nazi characters who were being hunted down and [End Page 237] tried for their crimes, or to collectively blame the German people for tacitly condoning their country's...

From a Stylistic Angle: Methodological Issues and Liminal Creativity

Stylistics can be said to borrow tools from one well-established discipline (linguistics) and step on the disciplinary toes of another (literature). The question of the legitimacy of its borders in the academic landscape in France can deservedly be raised. In this article which questions the frontiers of stylistics, the author sets up a mock trial, bringing to the witness box specialists of adjacent disciplines, linguistics and literature, uncompromisingly probing the legitimacy of stylistics. After offering a defence speech, the author shows how unfair this trial is to all participants involved, the reason being that the liminal issue applies to the field of stylistics in a specific way. The perimeter of stylistic studies has not been built on the construction of exclusive borders. The author shows why the field should be construed as both a welcoming and a migrating land that must be understood in this paradox: it has gained disciplinary legitimacy by paradoxically dismantling disciplinary partitions. Stylistics is a ‘connecting’ discipline that can further research by reviving dialogues between distinct fields of knowledge. In a very last section, a concrete illustration is given to the bridging capacity of stylistics, as it brings new light to another discipline, film/TV series studies that have been passed over from a pragma-stylistic angle.

Systemic lupus erythematosus.

Lupus comes from a Latin word that means wolf—an apt metaphor for the history of this savage and elusive condition. How did a painfully erosive rash, likened to cancer and then tuberculosis, become a chronic systemic disorder? Teasing out the details of this transformation shows how different ways of ordering medical knowledge and practice have framed a series of radically different disease entities under the same resonant name. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF Attention deficit hyperactivity disorderThink of all the names we have for children who cause trouble in classrooms: difficult, disruptive, naughty, attention-seeking, badly brought up, just plain bad. After the end of World War 2, American psychiatrists, pharmaceutical companies, and educationalists added a new term to this list, and a potent new frame for bad behaviour. Children who could not keep themselves in a chair or concentrate on a blackboard were not difficult or bad but hyperactive. They were suffering, so the new argument ran, from “a genetic, neurological glitch”, in the words of the historian Matthew Smith, and their condition could be managed with regular doses of stimulants. Full-Text PDF Ovarian cancerOn Christmas Day 1809, as the residents of Danville, Kentucky, sang carols in their churches, Jane Todd Crawford prepared for a terrible ordeal. 46 years old and the mother of four children, Crawford believed she was pregnant again with twins, but the full term had passed and her belly continued to swell. On Dec 13, 1809, she consulted the surgeon Ephraim McDowell, who diagnosed a massive ovarian tumour. Born in 1771, McDowell studied medicine in Virginia and Edinburgh, where he might have read John Hunter's discussion of surgery for ovarian cancer. Full-Text PDF

John Dickens in the Witness Box: The Mirror of Parliament and a Case of Libel

John Dickens in the Witness Box: The Mirror of Parliament and a Case of Libel